You are not limited to the life you now live. It has been accepted by you as the best you can do at this moment. Anytime you’re ready to go beyond the limitations currently in your life, you’re capable of doing that by choosing different thoughts.

We each earn the income we do today because that is the amount we have limited ourselves to earn. We could easily earn 5, 10, 20 times more if we did not limit ourselves through the thoughts we maintain.

Don’t believe that’s true? Surely you know people who earn much more than you who don’t have your education, your skills, or your intelligence. So why do they earn more than you?

I love the story of George Dantzig that Cynthia Kersey wrote about in Unstoppable. As a college student, George studied very hard and always late into the night; so late that he overslept one morning, arriving 20 minutes late for class. He quickly copied the two math problems on the board, assuming they were the homework assignment. It took him several days to work through the two problems, but finally he had a breakthrough and dropped the homework on the professor’s desk the next day.

Later, on a Sunday morning, George was awakened at 6 a.m. by his excited professor. Since George was late for class, he hadn’t heard the professor announce that the two unsolvable equations on the board were mathematical mind teasers that even Einstein hadn’t been able to answer. But George Dantzig, working without any thoughts of limitation, had solved not one, but two problems that had stumped mathematicians for thousands of years.

Simply put, George solved the problems because he didn’t know he couldn’t.

Bob Proctor tells us to “keep reminding yourself that you have tremendous reservoirs of potential within you, and therefore you are quite capable of doing anything you set your mind to. All you must do is figure out how you can do it, not whether or not you can. And once you have made your mind up to do it, it’s amazing how your mind begins to figure out how.”

And that’s worth thinking about.

Vic Johnson

(excerpted from Day by Day with James Allen)

Wherever You Are, Be There

One of the major reasons why we fail to find happiness or to create unique lifestyle is because we have not yet mastered the art of being.

While we are home our thoughts are still absorbed with solving the challenges we face at the office. And when we are at the office we find ourselves worrying about problems at home.

We go through the day without really listening to what others are saying to us. We may be hearing the words, but we aren’t absorbing the message.

As we go through we never even notice that today is slipping by.

We go through the day rather than getting something from the day. We are everywhere at any given moment in time exceptliving in that moment in time.

Lifestyle is learning to be wherever you are. It is developing a unique focus on the current moment, and drawing from it all of the substance and wealth of experience and emotions that it has to offer.

Lifestyle is taking time to watch a sunset. Lifestyle is listening to silence. Lifestyle is capturing each moment so that it becomes a new part of what we are and of what we are in the process of becoming.

Lifestyle is not something we do; it is something we experience. And until we learn to be there, we will never master the art of living well.

It seems as though the vast majority of people would much prefer to play it safe and avoid risk if at all possible. While this conservative game plan does avoid a certain amount of risk, the participant can never reach his or her full potential by playing it safe nor can he or she ever experience the unparalleled excitement life’s adventure holds in store.

Instead of boldly sculpting their life the way they want it, many instead choose to allow their lives and their futures to be shaped by circumstances seemingly beyond their control. Seemingly is the key word here. In their futile attempt to avoid risk, they have inadvertently taken the biggest risk of all by forfeiting control of their lives to outside forces. Their fate and their future is now out of their hands because they failed to accept the personal responsibility of making a choice and taking a chance.

Winners are winners because they are always ready, willing and able to take chances. While they rarely throw caution to the wind (although that devil-may-care avenue is much better than just sitting around and doing nothing at all), they are more than willing to take quantified risks. They recognize that there is a certain amount of risk in everything they do, so they constantly look for ways to minimize the risk on the chances they take. They do their home work and as a result are exceptionally well prepared when opportunity knocks.

These champions never jeopardize or gamble their future by leaving it in the hands of outside forces or circumstances. Whenever winners make mistakes and get knocked down in their quest for glory, they get up, get better and keep on going until their date with destiny is secured.

Winners would much rather go for the gold medal than settle for some inconsequential consolation prize. They figure that if something is worth doing, then it is worth winning too. These power performers are more than willing to take a chance on themselves.

Will you need to take a few risks to get where you want to go? Sure you will. Should that fact of life intimidate you and prevent you from fulfilling your destiny? No way! You simply need to plan to win, prepare to win, expect to win and then jump in with both feet and take a chance on yourself and your immeasurable abilities. Chances are great that when you do, your life will no longer be subject to chance or circumstance.

If only the “Cowardly Lion” had stopped for a moment and thought “What can I think and do today that I have been too scared to even consider before?”

In Italy, when my grandfather was only 6 years old, he had to go to work to help support his family. He only went to school through the 7th grade. From there on it was full time work for him. In 1926, at 18 years old, he came to the New World from the “Old Country” on a boat. He spoke not a word of English and had no money at all. Just a dream…

By the time he retired in 1969, he had over $50,000 USD saved, interest from investments and from selling his farm. The value of that money in today’s dollars is over $240,000. Not bad for a guy that had absolutely nothing going for him, huh?

Why did I tell you this story? Because it took courage to do all the things he did. And it took hard work, but he was always the first one to tell you that without the hard work and belief in his ability to get a job done, he couldn’t
have had the enormous joy he got from living.

Hey… you can do anything you want to do in your life if you’ll enjoy right now for what you can, look forward with expectancy, use the gifts and tools you’ve been given and accept whatever bad cards you’ve been dealt. It’s up to you to play them right. So stop stewing and start doing! You can
do great things. Believe!! When he got the farm, he had to clear tree filled orchards so that he could grow corn and other crops. And he didn’t own any buzz saws. It was the hard way… by hand. And the tree stumps? Pulled out by huge horses and ropes. The same with the giant boulders that dotted the fields.

It’s a sad thing to watch people become despondent with their lives. It’s sad because there has never been a time when the human race has had it so good, especially in industrialized countries. Better tools, better education,
better opportunities and better information to help take advantage of those opportunities.

Imagine how much harder it was to live decades ago and centuries ago. In many countries life is still the same as it was centuries ago. So please, keep these things in mind, consider yourself lucky and start acting like you’re lucky.

Do what you fear enough and you will have developed courage… Almost as if by magic.